Reducing Total Cost of Ownership In Business Intelligence

Centralising on a single Business Intelligence platform and data warehouse is well known for helping organizations become both more effective and efficient. But it will reduce the total cost of ownership of the Business Intelligence IT system too.

Several efficiencies can be realised. The single Business Intelligence platform can be used to consolidate your numerous disparate reporting mechanisms, meaning that you no longer need to license and maintain them. However, it’s not just the licensing and maintenance costs that can be saved. It can also be expensive to maintain different software from various vendors because the related skill sets must also be maintained. Centralising on a single business intelligence will introduce a common, core skill set that can be shared amongst teams at lower internal cost.

In terms of data, the tedious, error prone, and time expensive practice of manually hand cranking data load can also be replaced with a single ETL tool such Microsoft’s SSIS or Informatica. Not only does this remove the risk of user error in data quality but it brings increased efficiency by freeing team members up to do other work.

A single Business Intelligence platform can also drive down licensing costs. Though no way guaranteed, licensing economies of scale have historically been realised due to business intelligence vendor licensing discounts increasing as the number of user and product licenses bundled into a single purchase increased. This is more cost effective than procuring several small licenses for business intelligence software from different vendors.

This combination of consolidation, easier maintenance, increased efficiency, common skill set, and economy of scale drives down the total cost of ownership.